Over the last decade, Amazon’s cloud ecosystem has grown at a breakneck pace. In 2019, AWS touched net sales of US $35 billion making it the clear leader in cloud computing. One of the key drivers of this growth has come from Amazon Redshift, the data warehouse product in the AWS ecosystem that is designed for fast performance and incredible scale.
From a business model perspective, several enterprises around the world opted for Amazon Redshift because it was a “data warehouse as a service” or DWaaS, with a pay-per-month business model. Additionally, Redshift takes advantage of its Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) capability which speeds up the processing of larger datasets for analytics. It also seamlessly integrates with AWS Machine Learning, a key requirement for the future as more enterprises embrace next-generation technologies like AI and machine learning.
At Orbit, we’ve worked with various enterprises that are leveraging emerging cloud-based data warehousing solutions like Amazon Athena, Redshift, Snowflake, and Google BigQuery. A common use case we observe is that cloud-based data warehouses are being used by companies to pull data from various sources – both on-prem and cloud. While legacy data continues to be on Oracle ERP or SAP, companies are looking to use a cloud-based data warehouse, especially for reporting, BI, and analytics.
In this context, Orbit’s BI, Reporting, and Analytics solutions are very relevant. Thanks to our data management and data modeling capabilities, coupled with the data jump feature for data extracts – we’re able to ensure a smooth process of pulling data from multiple sources.
We recently worked with a leading satellite television company to pull data from multiple data sources including Amazon Redshift and Athena. The company was also using Amazon Athena for running queries and analyzing big data on S3. The company evaluated various options for operational reporting and analytics and chose Orbit for a variety of reasons.
In this post, we share a few reasons why Orbit is probably the best solution in the market to harness the full power of data, garner intelligence and insights from data residing in cloud data warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Amazon Athena.
#1 – Ability to unify data from both legacy data warehouses and new cloud-based data warehouse like Redshift
Most enterprises around the world are now grappling with an explosion of data. A common scenario is that ERP data continues to reside in legacy data warehouses. However, to leverage the full potential of BI and analytics, companies are using Amazon Redshift and Amazon Athena because it offers one of the best integration capabilities with your data lake and AWS services, a lot of the maintenance is automated and therefore it is easy to manage, and it offers wonderful performance, security, and scalability.
With Orbit, it is easy to pull data from both legacy warehouses and Amazon Redshift and Amazon Athena, ensuring all data is available for garnering insights.
#2 – Orbit’s plugins like Excel Edge for Excel reporting, GLSense for financial reporting are extremely useful for business users
For business users, analysis is often done in Excel. The BI, reporting, and analytics tool must be capable of accessing real-time data from the operational databases and data warehouse and most business intelligence solutions in the market don’t have capability to do this easily.
#3 – Orbit’s self-service capabilities
Self-service is one of Orbit’s most sought after capabilities that lets business users generate their reports in real-time and “on-demand”, without dependence on IT, to run analytics and speed up the decision-making process.
The scheduling feature as well as data visualization capabilities further provide users with flexibility and ease of use. This way, users can keep pace with business operations as Orbit enables keeping track of key business metrics and KPIs in real-time. Different queries can be posed to generate data summaries as required by the users.
The ability to access a wide-range of dashboards and reports without having to write code is a key value proposition of Orbit.
#4 – More powerful and user friendly than Amazon’s analytics products
AWS does have a range of solutions to help enterprises with analytics from data stored in various AWS data stores. There is Amazon Kinesis for real-time analytics, Amazon Elastic search Service for operational analytics, Amazon Quicksight for dashboards and visualization and AWS Deep Learning AMIs for predictive analytics using AI/ML.
But, for business users and business leaders, BI must be designed for ease-of-use and time savings. Also, the BI solutions must connect and integrate with ERPs and business systems that are not on the Amazon ecosystem.
Several enterprises choose Orbit for the depth and breadth of our product from three perspectives:
- Ease of integration with disparate data sources
- Unique self-service features and capabilities
- Range of pre-built content and reports
If you would like to talk to an expert or explore a case study of how we helped a Fortune 250 company with BI on top of Amazon Redshift and Amazon Athena, contact us here.